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The Washington Roundtable reflects on the first year since Donald Trump’s second win, before a live audience at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, on November 20th. The panel considers how cracks in the MAGA firmament may shape what’s next for the President and the Republican party. “American politics the last ten years have been dominated by this very singular disruptive figure of Donald Trump,” the staff writer Susan B. Glasser says. “So what we define as the new abnormal, for a whole generation of Americans is, in fact, the new normal.”

This week’s reading:

“Dick Cheney’s Long, Strange Goodbye,” by Susan B. Glasser

“The Darkest Thread in the Epstein E-mails,” by Jessica Winter

“The Meaning of Trump’s Presidential Pardons,” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

“Kash Patel’s Acts of Service,” by Marc Fisher

“How M.B.S. Won Back Washington,” by Isaac Chotiner

“Donald Trump Can’t Dodge the Costly K-Shaped Economy,” by John Cassidy

Tune in to The Political Scene wherever you get your podcasts.

One of the promotional images for the film “Two People Exchanging Saliva” is a black-and-white closeup of a woman, her face bruised, her nose bleeding, her eyes slack with ecstasy. What are we to make of the feelings that this woman stirs in us: the reflexive response of distress, and then a more cultivated, and therefore repressed, curiosity? What could hurt so good? The film is a fable about intimacy and consumerism set in a dystopian version of Paris where romantic touch, especially the kiss, is forbidden, punishable by death. The citizen in you laughs heartily as this film, a tragicomedy, skewers the hypocrisies and ironies of the repressed West. But the lover inside also aches: the directors, Alexandre Singh and Natalie Musteata, suspend us in a state of desire and longing, the thwarted kind.

Since 2021, the Galeries Lafayette, the luxury department store in Paris, has invited filmmakers to use its interiors at night. Singh and Musteata, who are partners in both work and life, exploit the aesthetic of the boutique, a severe geometric glamour, for their Buñuel-esque story of bourgeois sadness. The film is told in chapters. The first is called “Le Jeu” (“The Game”). A narrator, voiced by the Luxembourgian actress Vicky Krieps, her voice not godlike but instead melancholic and playful, introduces us to Malaise (Luàna Bajrami), a naïf shopgirl with sparkling eyes, counter to the meaning of her name. (Everyone in this bleak world is named after different states of bad humor.) Malaise will turn twenty-five soon. She is ill-fated, the narrator suggests. Malaise notices a customer, the beautiful Angine (Zar Amir Ebrahimi)—angina, in English, a reference to diseases of the heart—wandering soullessly through the department store, and she persuades the other woman to play a game.

The salesperson and her customer. The plain act of shopping gives cover to the instant attraction. The time to pay comes, and we receive a shock. Malaise carefully slips on a bejewelled glove and slaps Angine repeatedly. Currency in a shadowy world that condemns intimacy as animal and grotesque—“two people exchanging saliva” is another way to describe kissing—is violence. To be bruised is to be among the upper crust; Malaise’s co-workers feign status, outside of work, with painted-on bruises. The brutality of conformism, the draining of romantic love, the disavowal of human eroticism and desire—these are the tenets of the society that Singh and Musteata have drawn, with an impish humor, a society that must smell rank, given the interdiction against clean teeth.

But that slap. A punishment, a payment, a seduction, all at once. I could wax on about the allusive power of the film, its potential for mirroring our own sick societies. But what most interests me in this unnerving work is the slapping. Nothing in cinema is purer than the face. The camera’s love of the face is the medium’s original affair. And so the slap causes a visual distortion, and a spiritual betrayal—the camera running riot against its love object. “Two People Exchanging Saliva” rewrites the slap, making it akin to a kiss. Angine desperately returns to the store, again and again, to get her fix from Malaise, her face reddening from blood just below the surface, a canvas of her awakened desire. She had sleepwalked through her genteel married life, with a taciturn husband, called Chagrin, who is in the business of coffin-making—for all those unfortunate souls who could not live without the kiss.

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Only thirty per cent of the American public identifies with the MAGA movement, according to a recent NBC poll, but that coalition remains intensely loyal to Donald Trump in the face of scandals and authoritarian measures. Defections seem rare and come with the risk of reprisal, even from the President himself. Rich Logis is trying to make them less rare with his advocacy organization, Leaving MAGA. The nonprofit’s  website features testimonials from former adherents, and offers advice for how friends and family can reconnect after ruptures over politics. Logis himself had been a true believer: he worked on Trump’s campaign, wrote articles, released a podcast, and called Democrats “the most dangerous group in the history of our Republic, foreign or domestic—more than Islamic supremacists, more than the Nazis.” He didn’t view MAGA as reactionary, but “very progressive and forward-facing.” But somewhere along the way Logis hung up his red hat. “Even today, talking about my past, the feelings are conjured—those feelings of being welcomed and feeling like you’re part of something, and the exhilaration that comes from that,” he tells the New Yorker Radio Hour’s Adam Howard. Logis emphasizes that leaving MAGA is difficult because, as much as it’s a political ideology, it’s also an identity that meets emotional needs. “I think that there’s a lot of trauma within the MAGA base, whether it’s political or economic. . . . I’m not qualified to make any kind of diagnosis. I’m not a therapist or a clinician, but there’s a lot of pain within MAGA. And I think that a better question [instead] of asking ‘What’s wrong with you?’ is ‘What happened to you?’ ”

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The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

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Both major parties are experiencing a crisis of leadership in Washington. President Trump’s flip-flopping on the Epstein files acknowledges that, on this issue, at least, he has lost control of MAGA. For the Democrats, the collapse of their consensus on the government shutdown deepens a sense that the current leadership is ineffective. For all the talk of unity, the Party is profoundly divided on what message to convey to voters. “Some people argue that we should just—no matter what Donald Trump does or says—just always come back to the economy and prices,” Senator Chris Van Hollen, of Maryland, tells David Remnick. “And, of course, we should be very focussed on the economy and prices and rising health-care costs, as we have been. But to suggest that we should look the other way in the face of all these other outrages is, I think, a mistake, because I think the American people are tiring of Donald Trump. I think the polls indicate that.” Van Hollen is trying to pave a path between his party’s left and the establishment. He’s used the word “spineless” to describe colleagues in Congress who refused to endorse Zohran Mamdani in his mayoral campaign, but he has not called for Chuck Schumer to step down from leadership, as others have. Van Hollen wants “to be very much part of the debate as to where the Democratic Party goes.” Would that extend, Remnick wonders, to running for President? “My goal at this moment really is to stiffen the spine of the Democratic Party. But that means not just resistance to Trump. It also means taking on very powerful special interests that I think have had too much sway in both the Republican Party for sure, but also in the Democratic Party.” Remnick replies, “I’ve heard firmer nos in my time.”

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Two families, unconcerned with dignity. The Hathaways are farmers, in the English county of Warwickshire, with close ties to the land—some would say too close, at least in the case of Agnes, a young woman so eccentrically at one with nature that she is rumored to have been born of a forest witch. The Shakespeares are led by a glover, whose business has seen better days. His eldest son—William, of course, though he is not immediately identified as such—defrays his father’s debts by tutoring Agnes’s younger brothers in Latin, an arrangement that begets many reversals of fortune. Agnes and William fall in love; conceive a daughter, named Susanna; and marry, over the protests of their families. A few years later, Agnes bears twins, Hamnet and Judith, introducing a note of dread: Agnes’s dreams have shown two children, not three, standing at her deathbed. In more than one sense, the stage is set for tragedy.

What’s in a name? Plenty. At the beginning of “Hamnet,” a tempest of a movie from the director Chloé Zhao, we’re told that, in sixteenth-century England, the monikers Hamlet and Hamnet were used interchangeably. The premise of the film—and of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel of the same title, published in 2020—is that, after his son’s death, in 1596, Shakespeare wrote “Hamlet” in a burst of raw, unexpurgated grief. It’s a notion made for scholarly dispute: several other plays, including two comedies, “Much Ado About Nothing” and “As You Like It,” came between the death of Hamnet and the creation of “Hamlet.” Still, loss hews to no temporal logic but its own, and it would be foolish to hold O’Farrell’s unabashed historical fantasy to a persnickety standard. The more trenchant critique, surely, is that the entwining of art and life has become a tiresome conceit, predicated on the bland notion that all great fiction must have an autobiographical component and a therapeutic aim.

Zhao’s “Hamnet” does not exactly scrape the mold off these clichés, and that is fine and even fitting. If there be fungus of any kind, you can rest assured that the earthy Agnes (Jessie Buckley) will find a use for it. We first see her in a forest, curled up between the roots of a tree. Rising, she strides through the woods with a hawk on her arm and various mugwort-based remedies committed to memory. There has always been a native wildness to Buckley; in the psychological thriller “Beast” (2017), she was a creature of the Jersey coast, feral, urchinlike, perpetually smeared with mud. Here, she cuts a more serene woodland figure—pale of skin, dark of hair, and clad in rusty browns and reds. No wonder that, returning to her family’s farmhouse, she immediately transfixes William (Paul Mescal), the Latin tutor, who spies this vision of freedom and loveliness from an upstairs window and looks boxed in by comparison. Zhao emphasizes his entrapment, shooting him through glass—a studied choice, but one that contextualizes her interest in this particular story. Agnes, in her matter-of-fact harmony with the natural world, is like an Elizabethan ancestor of Zhao’s contemporary American protagonists: the melancholy Lakota horsemen of “Songs My Brothers Taught Me” (2016), a restless widow cast adrift in “Nomadland” (2020). The bookish William, meanwhile, is also recognizably a Zhao construct: as a new husband and father, struggling to write a play by candlelight, he is possessed by a stubborn sense of his vocation. No less than the gravely injured cowboy hero of “The Rider” (2017), brazenly chasing his rodeo dreams, William must do what he was born to do.

Zhao’s first three features were steeped in documentary realism, shot with a sturdy, windswept lyricism and abounding in nonprofessional actors. Then came her fourth picture, the clunky Marvel comic-book epic “Eternals” (2021)—a noble but self-evident failure, in which she channelled the visual and spiritual reveries of Terrence Malick, a longtime influence, in a vain attempt to transcend superhero-movie conventions. “Hamnet” is, inevitably, an improvement, though not exactly a return to form. It marks an unstable new mode for Zhao, a weave of subdued pastoral realism and forceful, sometimes pushy emotionalism. The movie whispers poetic sublimities in your ear one minute and tosses its prestige ambitions in your face the next.

The whiplash is disorienting, but, somewhat paradoxically, the characters’ romantic upheaval provides its own center of gravity. You are propelled alongside them as Agnes, sensing William’s creative and professional frustrations, packs him off to London to follow his dreams, hastening the pair’s descent into marital discontent and parental grief. Buckley is every inch the requisite force of nature, heaving and sweating up a storm as Agnes wrenches her children into this world, and moving swiftly from anguish to rage—a drained, defeated anger—as one of those children is yanked back out of it. Buckley and Mescal, both Irish and both bountifully gifted, have done quieter, subtler work elsewhere, though I can’t say that their histrionics miss the mark. What is “Hamnet,” or “Hamlet,” without a little ham?

O’Farrell’s novel is subtitled “A Novel of the Plague.” Its most gripping, least typical chapter describes an outbreak in breathlessly suspenseful detail, tracking the contagion from Alexandria, where a shipworker has a fateful encounter with a monkey’s fleas, all the way to England and, eventually, the Shakespeares’ doorstep. It’s no surprise that the film dispenses with this; its focus is on the domestic claustrophobia that William escapes and Agnes sacrificially endures. Agnes finds some comfort from her supportive brother Bartholomew (Joe Alwyn) and, in time, her mother-in-law, Mary (Emily Watson), who initially disapproves of Agnes but comes around to a grudging respect, rooted in shared experiences of drudgery and loss. This is Zhao’s first collaboration with the Polish cinematographer Łukasz Żal, who, in the Holocaust drama “The Zone of Interest” (2023), used an array of small hidden cameras to suggest the daily, routinized horrors of a Nazi family. “Hamnet” attempts nothing so technically virtuosic or historically queasy, and yet a not dissimilar air of home surveillance persists. Indoors, the Shakespeares are often shot unnaturally head on or in high-angled panoramas that diminish their stature. We could be studying them under glass.

Such intensity of focus may also explain why Zhao and O’Farrell have jettisoned the novel’s nonsequential narrative structure, which shuttles, quite intricately, between two parallel time frames. The film, by contrast, moves cleanly from start to finish, forgoing any impulse toward Malickian nonlinearity. Even so, Zhao remains vividly under the spell of Malick the image-maker, and also Malick the intimate observer of the everyday. She has a great eye for sunlight, especially when filtered through a woodsy canopy of green, and in the family’s happier moments she’s exquisitely attentive to the joyful chaos of Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe) and Judith (Olivia Lynes) at play. At one point, the kids pretend to be the Weird Sisters. Their father may be a fitful presence at home, but his work already has them under its spell.

But not Agnes. When Hamnet is gone, she increasingly resents her husband’s absences. This manifests itself not in fits of fury but in a silent indifference to the work that keeps William away, and we sense that “Hamnet” means to deliver a feminist corrective to the myth of male genius. But it’s a halfhearted rebuke; the movie does, in the end, give that genius its due, and with a compensatory haste that occasionally throws Mescal’s performance off balance. During rehearsals, the distracted, tormented playwright forces a young star (Noah Jupe) to run his lines ragged; later, strolling moodily along the Thames, William adopts Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” soliloquy as his own. The play’s clearly still the thing, but its invocations here seem facile in the face of a father’s grief.

Shakespeare’s creation comes to life more effectively onstage, and with Agnes there to witness it. Until now, she has avoided the Globe like, well, the plague, and the mere act of theatregoing strikes her as alien. There’s a comic aspect to her confusion—chronic shushers will be triggered to the point of distraction—which only reveals the utterly guileless depth of Buckley’s absorption in the role. Agnes’s nescience encourages us to see “Hamlet”—staged here on a forest set that takes us back to the film’s Edenic beginning—through fresh eyes. My own, I confess, were soon blurred by tears, brought on with such diluvial force as to both quench my skepticism and reawaken it. There is, for starters, the shameless deployment of Max Richter’s “On the Nature of Daylight,” a lush track that, from “Shutter Island” (2010) to “Arrival” (2016), has grown hoary with overuse. There is, too, the inherent kitsch in reducing one of the richest, most intellectually prismatic works in English literature to an instrument of healing. “Hamlet” has been many things for many centuries; here, it is chiefly the vessel for a parent’s closure. The rigor of the text melts, thaws—and resolves itself into adieu. ♦